3 Body Problem, Cultural Revolution, Netflix vs Tencent - Essay #5

This has been a writing-heavy week for me because of my intensely discussed Chinese article on the VC industry. So I will skip a weekly review this time and will write about something more casual. I will just comment on the Netflix rendition of the 3 Body Problem三体, why I think this series falls flat, and specifically what are the strengths and weaknesses of its treatment of the controversial Cultural Revolution scenes.

Warning: minor spoilers ahead.

I want to start by saying that, although I applaud the Netflix team’s courage and innovativeness in re-inventing the story, I think at least for a book fan, this version of the 3BP does little justice to the original work. And that’s not the problem with the racially diverse casting, nor the problem of filming it in England. These are not what most of the book fans in China complain about as far as I can see.

The real problem is much deeper than that, and may be phrased in some way like this:

The original work, written by Liu Cixin, is set on a gigantic, cosmological scale, with a worldview that transcends time and space, and the reason it is so fascinating is because of the enormous cosmic horror that it generates for his readers. When I read this book more than a decade ago, long before it became a global phenomenon, I always thought of this line from Tao Te Ching:

天地不仁 以万物为刍狗

Heaven and Earth are impartial; they treat all of creation as straw dogs.

And that’s a direct challenge to the typical H.G. Wells or Hollywood imagination of aliens. The difference between species can be so huge, that it could be incomprehensible for the weaker party. It’s not that aliens could destroy us, but that aliens could destroy us without noticing it, like how a bug is killed by your windshield. It’s not that aliens are evil, they could be totally indifferent.

That idea is very scary. But how did Netflix present this idea? Badly. Netflix made a strategic creative decision to merge the main characters of all 3 books into the same timeline, which is a fun idea. The downside of this choice is that by fusing the task of world-saving into a single team of young graduates from Oxford and doing character development for all of them in a span of mere 8 episodes, they trivialized the whole story. Instead of a true 3BP, we got this adult version of Stranger Things.

Worse yet, I sense that, for many non-book fans, this series seems “quite good”, while I know that if the series is done correctly, the right reaction should be, “Goddammit, this is SO good!”. It’s just a wasted opportunity for this work to be truly appreciated by a wider audience. The despair is not dissimilar to how I felt when the same production team butchered the last few seasons of Game of Thrones.

In comparison, I feel that Tencent’s rendition is much more effective. That version was conservative and followed the book plot verbatim. But it did an excellent job of setting up the aura of cosmic horror and developing the main characters. To offset Liu Cixin’s infamous inability to portray characters, this show delved really deep into the main characters. For example, the psychological breakdown over “the numbers” of Wang Miao, the nanotechnology scientist, was done step by step and highly credible. But just before his spirit was totally destroyed, Da Shi, the policeman’s “fuck with the numbers” speech to him was also so stirring.

The real highlight of the show was how Ye Wenjie’s story was made multi-dimensional. A crucial scene, which was totally omitted from the Netflix version, was about how Ye made a choice to murder his husband, chief engineer Yang Weining, and Red Coast commissar Lei Zhicheng, in one go. That important scene was dealt with splendidly in Tencent’s version.

The Tencent version is simpler, but it seems sometimes being simple is the best way to go. And it’s not that simple, even the CGI effects at that Panama thing actually feel more authentic than the Netflix version, which is surprising, given that superior CGI technology is often seen as one of the biggest advantages of Western cinema.

Who would have thought, that Chinese production teams could now be better at the most important quality that people are looking for in films and TV shows: telling a good story? I really hope this can continue so that the idea that China does not produce good-quality cultural output can be settled. (The only problem I have with the Tencent version is that like most other Chinese TV shows, it’s too long. I had to skip some non-essential parts to keep moving. If another production team can make a compromise between Tencent’s 30 episodes and Netflix's 8 episodes, we may have a 9.5/10 show here.)

You can watch the Tencent version on YouTube. Interestingly, now the comment section is filled with appreciation of this version compared with the Netflix version.

The Cultural Revolution scenes

Now I think the biggest debate surrounding this show, at least outside of China, is its treatment of the Cultural Revolution(CR), something that Western audiences have probably only heard of but never understood what it was, until this show.

I will not touch on the history and politics of CR and how that is (or is not) related to either today’s China or America’s “Wokeism”. I believe this topic has already been well covered by

Kaiser Y Kuo

in his latest work at

Sinica

. Instead, I will only comment on the cinematic treatment of CR, and also compare it with Tencent’s version.

I agree with Kaiser that this portrayal of the CR is actually, surprisingly good! Although I didn’t live through that era, it would be quite close to what I would imagine that period to be. It’s also very good that this time, they got to hire people who actually can speak real Chinese, rather than the annoying, Selena-Wang-style fake Chinese that one can commonly find in Hollywood films.

The problem with this treatment is this: Netflix’s show over-dramatizes, under-contextualizes, and de-humanize the Cultural Revolution. At best, it’s an outsider's view of the most violent part of that period. But it feels alien. It feels like an amateurish school-level drama project about a crazy world unrelated to you, and you are not allowed to get yourself truly immersed in it. The audience was basically shown one scene, where crazy red guards beat Ye Zhetai to death over some crazy ideas. And that’s it.

Again, we can compare this with the Tencent version.

Did the Tencent version show the violent “struggle sessions批斗大会”? No. But they had their own way to tell the story of that era. You could see Ye Wenjie watching his father hanging himself in a cold, dark night, alone. You would not see Ye Zhetai’s wife denunciating the physicist in front of red guards, but that part was artfully implied through “cold violence” and contempt that the wife showed to Ye in their daily lives. In the Netflix version, the forest journalist Bai Mulin did no more than give Ye Wenjie a book that eventually got her in trouble (besides also sleeping with her, which was also only implied in the Tencent version). But the real plot is that Bai is a morally corrupt weasel who lied to authorities about ownership of the book. In the Tencent version, he even threw the book at Ye, breaking her head, a betrayal that really made Ye mad about humanity.

You see, although there are no scenes of some crazy ultra-leftists beating academic authorities to death, all the elements of human tragedy are there. And I actually think this more subtle treatment was not only scarier but more importantly, made Ye’s arc of development from the daughter of an anti-revolutionary to the doom-bringer of humanity very credible. This is a huge arc, and I simply don’t find this arc to be credible in the Netflix version.

You may argue back to me that maybe it’s not Tencent’s choice to not show more explicit CR scenes, but rather that those scenes are not allowed in China. It’s probably true. But my counter will be, what good does it bring?

I have two points to make here. One, many of the people who went through that torment (both on the causing end and the receiving end) are still alive. You will need to think twice about opening an old wound.

Second, I do believe that the soil for another CR, essentially a violent populist dismantling of elites, is always part of our cultural genetics. Frequent readers of my newsletter will be familiar with the stories of “Operation Warhorse”, “Iron-head Brother”, the Nongfu Spring incident, or even the rise and fall of Bo Xilai who in 2012 almost won the bid for ultimate power on a platform of CR-style policies. It will only take a few simple steps, some violence, some mass mobilization, and some really ambitious guy at the top of the power structure looking to harness the ever-present populist anger, before the scourge of the Cultural Revolution is unleashed again onto this land.

So I do think the censorship over the more explicit parts of that era is at least understandable, and I disagree with the idea that showing something in its gory details serves the purpose of preventing it. When a mass shooter kills people in the US, the media swoops in for 24/7 coverage. That doesn’t make the gun crime issue any less serious. All the great American TV shows about violence don’t make the world a less violent place.

Let’s not kid ourselves and confuse social good with sheer enjoyment from entertainment. Violence may be “good” entertainment. But from a social perspective, re-enacting violence probably only does the exact job of encouraging it, rather than discouraging it.

And Tencent’s version shows that you can still talk about a painful episode in China, through art and tactical decisions. The result is something subtle, but no less poignant. And maybe that’s also better if we want to prevent bad things from happening again.

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Please join the poll in the end! I am really keen to understand if reactions from book readers and non-readers are meaningfully different.